How Unconditional Love Helps Kids with Setbacks

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Teens who spend some time thinking about situations in which
their peers thought well of them, no matter what they did, may
have an easier time coping with setbacks, new findings show.

Adolescents in the study who wrote an essay about a time when
they felt "unconditional regard" from their peers had fewer
negative feelings about themselves after getting a bad report
card than kids who wrote about a time when they felt their peers'
regard was "conditional," the researchers found.

"We studied this in early adolescence—a time when negative
self-feelings peak, and when children often experience
conditional regard from peers," said Eddie Brummelman, who was a
Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology at Utrecht University
in the Netherlands when he helped conduct the study. "Although we
did not study the actual provision of unconditional regard, our
findings do suggest that helping
children feel accepted and valued without conditions (for
example, by reminding them of unconditionally accepting others)
might help them buffer their negative self-feelings."

"Unconditional regard" is similar to the more-familiar
"unconditional love," and it means that others accept and value
you without reservations or conditions. "Conditional regard
refers to others making their regard conditional upon the
participant's actions, performances or abilities," Brummelman
said.

"Sometimes, even well-intended socialization messages can convey
a sense of conditional regard, such as when people are warmer,
more affectionate towards the child when he or she does well in
school compared to when he or she doesn't do so well," said
Brummelman, who is now a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam,
Research Institute of Child Development and
Education. [ 10
Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids ]

Feeling negative about oneself in adolescence is not only
painful, but can also put a person at risk of psychological
problems such as
depression and anxiety, Brummelman and his colleagues wrote
in their study, published today (Nov. 3) in the journal
Pediatrics.

The researchers hypothesized that kids' feelings of shame,
insecurity and powerlessness upon receiving a bad grade might be
lessened if they had previously spent time thinking about times
in their lives when they'd experienced unconditional regard. To
investigate, the researchers recruited 247 children between ages
11 and 15 and randomly assigned them to write for 15 minutes
about either experiences of unconditional regard, conditional
regard, or other social experiences.

For example, one 14-year-old girl wrote about a time when she'd
been working with a friend and made a lot of mistakes, but the
friend still valued her. Another 14-year-old girl wrote about a
time when she'd made mistakes during a handball match, and her
teammates "looked away from me and started ignoring me."

Three weeks later, the study participants received their first
report card of the year. Later that night, they filled out an
online questionnaire about how they felt about their grades.

As the researchers had expected, among the adolescents whose
grades were poor, those who'd written about their experiences of
unconditional regard felt less negative about themselves than
those who'd written about conditional regard, and those who had
written about other experiences. But there was no difference
among the three groups in their levels of
negative feelings toward other people, the researchers noted.

"One question that sometimes comes up is, how can the
unconditional-regard exercise exert its sustained effects,"
Brummelman told Live Science. "It doesn't seem likely that the
exercise simply remains accessible in children's minds over long
periods."

More likely, [it] is that the exercise creates a self-sustaining
process: When children feel unconditionally accepted by others,
they may express more welcoming social behavior, thereby
eliciting more acceptance from others," he said.